There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life-preserver thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly above the wash-stand, a neatly printed card announces: “The occupant of this room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard side.” It makes quite definitely clear the circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no holiday jaunt. One ought at least to know how to wear a life-preserver. Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine on. It isn’t a “perfect 36.” “But they don’t come any smaller,” the steward says. “You just have to fold them over so,” and he ties the strings tight. Will they hold in the highest sea, I wonder.
The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by pretty nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking the Great Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot house. We all earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us across the Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx.
Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation. I don’t know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of inspection to one’s personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean over the steamship’s rail to look for the great letters four feet high and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea German craft to notice that this is the neutral New Amsterdam of the Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: “Now that makes us quite safe, don’t you think?” And somebody answers as promptly as expected. “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t sink us when they see that sign.” And no one speaks the thought that’s plain in every face: “But Huns make ‘mistakes.’ And remember the Lusitania.”
We always are remembering the Lusitania. I never dress for dinner at night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes. We play cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely while away the recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my next play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe that the band is just beginning.